My hero

Friday 22 July 2011 17.55 EDT
First published on Friday 22 July 2011 17.55 EDT

Like pretty much all the good music I discovered as a teenager, Björk's songs first came to me through the shared wall between my bedroom and that of my elder sister. Among the early-90s rave and jungle that I hated (and would, years later, sneak into her bedroom to borrow) I occasionally heard a record by a girl who sang as though she was fighting off dogs. Since I was listening exclusively to punk at the time, it was this voice, with its distorted screech – the vocal equivalent of scraping a plectrum down guitar strings – that caught my attention. It's not surprising that Björk had begun, aged 14, fronting an all-girl Icelandic punk band, Spit and Snot.

For me, Vespertine, her fourth studio album, is perfect. It's brilliantly sustained, full of unshowy but detailed instrumentation and long melodies, and her voice is at its most vivid. Every track repays repeated listening. The lyrics are intimate, delicate and, occasionally, dirty: "When I wake up / the second time / in his arms / gorgeousness / he's still inside me."

Around the same time, she was starring in Lars von Trier's film, Dancer in the Dark, for which she won best actress at Cannes and wrote the (brilliant) soundtrack before vowing never to act again. It is said that she "reinvents herself" but, for me, that doesn't capture it. In a recent interview, she said: "I'm totally run by impulse . . . I'm just doing my best to escape boredom."

Even when I didn't get along with the throat-singing and beatboxing on 2004's Medúlla, it was still fascinating to see the direction she was taking and the clues it gave to the music she was yet to make. Watching her in Manchester last week, where she had hooked up a synth to a Tesla coil (a kind of lightning cage) to create a gloriously mean buzzing accompanied by a 20-piece all-girl Icelandic choir, it did not feel like reinvention, but development.